As your company grows, it will be important to adopt various marketing tools and strategies to enhance your visibility. For example, you can work with your bookkeeping and accounting firm to develop a marketing budget and create reporting tools that will help you track expenses related to each marketing campaign or project. In addition, there are many ways to increase your online presence and engage new customers. In this blog, we’ll explore methods to organically increase your visibility and suggest some ideas for adding a marketing component to your growing business without having a full-time marketing team.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to increase your online presence and drive traffic to your website. You can create weekly campaigns to engage your followers. This is an inexpensive way to advertise your business, but you’ll need to be consistent in your messaging and be prepared to put effort into this each week. You can use social media to introduce new employees, announce your presence at a tradeshow, or when launching a new product. The more you can personalize your brand and engage your audience, the more successful you’ll be. You can experiment and see which posts get more traction and do more of what works!
Website
One way to get more traffic to your website is to post your articles on the website and link your social media posts to the website. As people click through, they will be directed back to your website. There are tools you can purchase to track website traffic and social media engagement. There are virtual marketing agencies out there now that can help you reach your marketing goals without hiring a full-time marketing department, saving you lots of time and money.
Trade Shows
Do your research before deciding to exhibit at a tradeshow. Exhibiting at tradeshows is expensive, and you’ll want to make sure your time and money converts to new customers and sales for your business. Find out what tradeshows your current customers attend and what they like about each show. If possible, find a compatible company partner to share the booth with you. For example, if you sell office furniture, you might consider partnering with a company that sells other office supplies. This way, you offset the cost of the booth and should get more traffic to your booth.
You’ll want to work with your bookkeeping and accounting firm to come up with a budget for the associated costs for travel, hotel, car rental, booth rental, booth signage, advertising, and marketing expenses. Whenever possible, try to exhibit at a tradeshow close to home so you can forgo the travel and hotel costs.
Speak at Conferences
Become an expert in your field. One way to build this reputation is to become a speaker at a conference. You will be paid for your time and travel and will get to speak about a topic relevant to your business. This form of “soft sell” is a great way to meet people and tell them about your business. Take a look at conferences and conference themes and find one that you could build a presentation for. The tradeshow website will have a section early on calling for speaker proposals. You’ll want to apply early and create a pitch that ties into the conference theme. For instance, if you provide support services for college students off-campus, you might put together a presentation to speak at a national student leadership conference that would help you get the word out about your services.
Your bookkeeping and accounting firm should be able to help you develop a marketing budget and plan and provide you with reporting tools that will help you stay on track and make adjustments as needed. EVA Business Solutions love to help our clients build profitable businesses and keep them running smoothly! We are a virtual bookkeeping and accounting service ready to assist you with all of your bookkeeping, marketing, financial planning, and accounting needs. Call us today at (615) 461-7157.
